About Us

The name EMBRACE invokes the concept of a parent embracing a child while engaged in shared reading. It is also an acronym for Enhanced Moved by Reading to Accelerate Comprehension in English. The goal of EMBRACE is to profoundly enhance children’s ability to read, comprehend, and enjoy English texts.

Dr. Arthur Glenberg

Dr. Arthur Glenberg is a cognitive psychologist who earned his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1974. He holds appointments at Arizona State University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Spain’s Universidad de Salamanca. Much of his research over the past 20 years has focused on new approaches to understanding language and reading comprehension, and that research led to development of the EMBRACE system. His published research has been cited more than 20,000 times.

Dr. M. Adelaida Restrepo

Dr. M. Adelaida Restrepo is a research associate on the EMBRACE project and the Assistant Dean for Research and Professor in the College of Health Solutions at Arizona State University. She is the director of the Bilingual Language and Literacy Laboratory, whose main mission is to identify best language assessment and intervention practices for bilingual children at risk of academic difficulties. She specializes in oral language and emergent literacy development and in prevention of academic difficulties in bilingual children. She is a bilingual speech-language pathologist who has had ongoing funding for at least 16 years in projects building oral language and literacy in preschool, kindergarten and school-age children who speak Spanish as their native language. She is a former associate editor from Language, Speech and Hearing Services in the Schools, and reviews and publishes in a variety of journals in English and Spanish. She is a certified member of the American Speech Language and Hearing Association. She was funded by Fulbright Scholars grant to conduct a project in Israel on response to intervention.

Dr. Erin Walker

Dr. Erin Walker is a research associate for the EMBRACE project and an Associate Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, with appointments in the School of Computing and Information and the Learning Research and Development Center. She completed her PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University in 2010. Her research uses interdisciplinary methods to improve the design and implementation of educational technology, and to understand when and why it is effective. Walker's work has resulted in many journal articles and peer-reviewed full conference papers, including a best paper award at Creativity and Cognition and award nominations at the Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Artificial Intelligence in Education, and Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning conferences. She was named to Phoenix Magazine's 40 under 40 list in 2018.

“My daughter pays more attention now to what she’s reading. She is motivated to read in Spanish more. Even though she is a good reader, she likes reading even more with the EMBRACE program ”

EMRBACE

Parent

“My son does not like reading, so at first he did not want to participate, but once we started he changed his mind and enjoyed reading with the iPad”

EMBRACE

Parent

“My daughter wants to read more. We go to the library to get books almost every week.”

EMBRACE

Parent